Metro Pulse/Pulp/Michael Chabon, Chris Ware

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Books by and about the comic book writers

by Paul Lewis

One of the most maligned and misunderstood of our art forms is the comic book. Those who read them are more often than not considered emotionally stunted, sophomoric child-beings. And the people who actually write, draw, and produce them? Why, they must be sociopaths. At best. Luckily, a couple of recent books paint a more accurate picture of the act of creation in the visual art of the comic book, as well as the highs to which that form can be stretched when in the right artist's hands.

Michael Chabon, best known for the book turned movie Wonder Boys, has turned out a circa-WWII period piece, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Random House, $26.95), that was rightly praised as one of the best books of 2000 in critical circles. The story follows the escape of Josef Kavalier, a young Jew in Nazi-occupied Prague, to the New York of 1939 and the big dreams of his cousin, Sam Klayman, shortened to the professional name of Clay. Sam works for novelty kingpin Sheldon Anapol and pitches the idea of using a comic book, popularized by the new character Superman, to sell the widgets and gizmos. Anapol is sold on Josef's artwork, and thus is born The Escapist, a Houdini-esque analog who vows to free all humanity from the shackles of oppression and tyranny.

Besides writing a primer on the early days of the comic book industry, Chabon breathes full form and life into his protagonists. Josef Kavalier is a young man without peer, deft and keenly intelligent, trained as an artist of escape as well as illustration. He is hamstrung by his hatred of the monsters who took his family and home from him, who keep him from living a full life in his adopted city despite the financial success of his comic books. His rage finds a safe outlet in The Escapist's battles with the Nazi hordes for a time, but as his attempts to free his family from Prague hit every hindrance, he must stare down the pain himself. Sam Clay is much more an everyman from a home not so much broken as badly bent, struggling to even have an identity outside of the fact that he can tell a gripping yarn on four-color pages. Sam is often overshadowed by Josef's sheer vibrancy, but as he begins his self-discovery, his silence and understated confusion become all too appropriate.

Kavalier is a celebration of both the creative potential of comic books and an eminently readable log of a time and place in history. Chabon brings in the occasional historic figure such as Salvador Dali, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Orson Welles to further his atmosphere and inspire his artists to new creative insights. And unlike many "important" books that have a tendency to be dry and dull, Chabon excels as a storyteller as well as a wordsmith. Despite a final fourth that is oft-frustrating in its inevitability, the pages turn at a brisk clip and you're left with the feeling of a fine writer operating at the peak of his power.

Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (Pantheon, $27.50) is a bit of an ironic title as the intelligence of the protagonist isn't even the point of the story, and he's also thirtysomething. It's also a somewhat atypical use of the comic form to tell a difficult, often painful story, from a distinct point of view. Corrigan works in a cubicle, is ignored by co-workers and women, and has to call his domineering mother once a day. He can barely express himself, lives in a fantasy world, and feels so insignificant he becomes insignificant. Jimmy's father, whom he's never met, contacts him and invites him to Chicago to visit, and the difficult reunion is the centerpiece of the story. Rather than simply relate the visit, Ware stretches time and space and foregoes linear narrative to also visit Jimmy's grandfather, also named Jimmy Corrigan, during his own unhappy childhood with an abusive father. The end result is a work of motifs and patterns and a stunning, mournful sense of deja vu.

The aggregate effect is of the sort that can only be achieved in comic art, and Ware, in using icons and a sharp sense of geometric design (his draftsmanship of architecture, in particular, is stunning, and it works in the story as an indictment of the cheap plastic structures that now pass for buildings in America) invests his deceptively simple figures with the life of someone you could encounter on the street or a place you could visit. Ware gets so many small details right, from sound effects to body posture to the humiliation in small failures we all feel from time to time.

It is not always an easy read; sometimes he ignores the traditional flow of panel into panel, and also the pain of these characters is too real to bear. Ware does find bits of humor in unexpected places and even ends his story with a tremulous note of hope, but the real joy is seeing a medium stretch its artistic boundaries before your eyes.